field notes

When you screw

up, interesting
things happen.
Competence is
boring.
Whats the least glamorous
aspect of travelling as
much as you do?
The least glamorous aspect of travel
writing is editors. Increasingly,
they know less and less about good
prose and more and more about
advertising.

What is one skill every

aspiring traveler should
develop?

Better to have basic lack of skills.

When you screw up, interesting
things happen. Competence is boring.

Lawrence Millman has traveled far and wide, from the frozen tundras of Antarctica to
the humid jungles of Ecuador, and has written every step of the way. Hes the author
of sixteen books, including An Evening Among Headhunters and Lost in the Arctic, and
his work has been published in such magazines as Sports Illustrated, National Geographic
Adventure, and Smithsonian. Heres what he had to say about the travel writers life.

A better question would be, Whats

become so unrewarding about travel
nowadays? Answer: globalization
(i.e., Americanization, or what the
Russians call snickersatsyn). I hate
seeing place after place lose its
identity. Im currently in Bratislava
in Slovakia, and half the signs are in
English . . . American English.

64 fall 2015

What came first: the

traveling or the writing?

Writing came first. I wrote a sixpage novel called Quivox and the
Ghosts at age seven. The title
characters name had several
obscure letters of the alphabeta
sign of my future interest in obscure
places.

Whats the biggest mishap

youve had on a trip?

I told an Inuk that his snoring was

driving me crazy, whereupon he
refused to guide me to a major Arctic
petroglyph [rock engraving] site, a
trip for which Id gotten considerable
funding. You can read about this in
Hiking to Siberia as well.

Photo by Tom Rotger

What do you find most

rewarding about travel?

Left: photo by Matthew Kirkland. Right: photo by Edward Faulkner

A Talk with Lawrence Millman

Why mushrooms?

Why mushrooms? Because searching

for them returns me to my timehonored hunter-gatherer self.

When writing about a trip,

how do you choose which
experiences to highlight?
The experience chooses me; I dont
choose it.

Youve discovered a
previously unknown lake
in Borneo as well as a
thought-to-be extinct
species of fungus. Which
for you was the more
exciting experience?

Neither was as exciting as finding

a totally botanized human skeleton
in a burial cairn in Hudson Strait.
You can read about this find in my
book Hiking to Siberia.

Theres a mountain
named after you in
eastern Greenland. How
did that happen?

The mountain was named after me

because I made the first ascent of it.
The ascent was non-technical and
no more difficult than climbing, for
example, Mt. Washington in New
Hampshire.

Is there anywhere youve

yet to visit that you would
like to?
The one place Id still like to visit
is Tristan da Cunha in the South
Atlanticbut not on a cruise ship!

lawrencemillman.com

Samuel Wright

Left: Millman is an accomplished mycologist and has built an inventory of fungi numbering 490 species. Right: Millman is a member of the
prestigious Explorers Club, an organization that promotes field research.

www.stowawaymag.com 65